Election Night HQ

Ana Marie Cox, the alter ego of the Wonkette, blogs for Swampland on Time.com.  In her distinctive SwampCasts, she provides a unique, irreverent perspective on the campaign trail.

In this SwampCast: Never Say Inevitable, she outlines three scenarios by which Senator McCain would not be able to obtain the Republican nomination.  Fortunately, AMC seems to be fairly skeptical that any of these scenarios she outlines will actually materialize, and I share that skepticism… as she summarizes it:

Three ways McCain could still lose. (For more on the fuzzy math that would get Romney to a delegate fight, see here.)

1) Something could go horribly, horribly wrong.

Granted, there is always the possibility.  One would be a scandal; another could be something along the lines of a terrorist attack that she mentions - something that would make the dynamics of Super Tuesday insignificant.  In any election, there is always the possibility that an unrelated 11th-hour development could be a game-changing factor.  Of course, we all hope that no disaster takes place, obviously.

As for a scandal involving McCain - it’s possible, but with every hour ticking off the clock w/o one breaking, it just becomes a matter of running out the clock (to borrow the metaphor you use in point #3).  Moreover, this essentially means that if the race stays frozen in place, McCain wins and wins big.  That’s not much hope for Mitt.

2) A conservative uprising against McCain.

Of the three hopes remaining for Mitt, I believe this one has the most plausibility.

(I emphasize “most”, because the only other two possibilities AMC mentions are a meltdown by McCain, or Mitt’s sudden revival and winning all remaining primaries and caucuses by wide margins, AFTER Super Tuesday.)

Why I think this is implausible-

As Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has noted on McCain,

“Many people wrongly assume that average voters are as ideological as party leaders (broadly defined to include elected party members, prominent personalities in the party, and ideologues on op/ed pages and in opinion journals). They are not… This means that McCain is probably more acceptable to rank-and-file Republicans than we might initially think.”

Cost is right.  If he weren’t, he never would have gotten this far to begin with.  The attacks on him by those whom she cites, have not stopped McCain from winning up until now, and with less ideological voters in the big states coming to the fore, their influence is going to be even more diluted.  And I agree with AMC, that if there was going to be some kind of anti-McCain uprising, it already would have taken place.

Likewise, per Huck -

I concur w/ AMC  - seeing little reason why Huck’s voters would suddenly switch to Mitt, in order to stop McCain.  They’ll either vote for Huck, or not vote.  The number that would switch - for purely tactical reasons - is far too low, to save Mitt anywhere.  If they wanted to save Mitt, they’d already be supporting him.

3) Going all the way to the convention in the Twin Cities.

I would wholeheartedly agree with her opinion in this scenario (w/ the never-say-never caveat, of course).  Her football analogy is right on the mark.

Every time McCain wins, he gains more momentum and more free-media and more money.  Mitt has not been able to win, even in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida, where he vastly outspent his opposition.  If McCain beats him (even if he doesn’t beat him by much) on Super Tuesday, why would there be any reason to think Mitt would suddenly begin to win, w/o those advantages?

I see little evidence that Mitt would begin to win - at all - after a Super Tuesday scenario in which he does not obtain a decisive victory.  Let alone by the margins that he would need to, in order to erase such a huge lead in delegates.  His donor base would start to erode, and even Mitt must have a limit as to how much of their own money they want to put into this, if there appears to be no chance of victory.

There would also be resistance within the party establishment to a scorched-earth campaign run all the way to September against McCain.  The number of, as Jon Martin so aptly puts it at The Politico, “train-leaving-the-station” endorsements piling up are ample evidence of that fact - and those are coming in prior to Super Tuesday.  What will the flood be like if McCain wins (or wins big) on Tuesday?

Anyhow, well done analysis by AMC…

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